Doubling mortgage processing capacity

The client is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations. With more than 39 million customers through four global businesses: Retail Banking and Wealth Management, Commercial Banking, Global Banking and Markets, and Global Private Banking. The client’s network covers 66 countries and territories in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, North America and Latin America.

Improve efficiency in back-office operations, to handle an expected doubling of mortgage requests in response to the client’s new marketing campaign.

Using the Open Orbit platform – users were able to complete analysis of their back- office operations. This was completed in 75% less time (4 weeks instead of the usual 3 – 4 months). Users guided by Open Orbit’s algorithm were able to suggest a few pivotal changes to IT systems and to staff training that resulted in the client doubling mortgage processing capacity.

Increase capacity within a short time period due to the fixed nature of the marketing campaign. The team needed to double its processing capacity in under 4 months.

Projects of this kind are usually expected to take about 7 to 8 months, with about 50% of the time spent in analysing what’s wrong, and the rest being spent on fixing it.

Client business users guided by the Open Orbit platform suggested a few pivotal changes to the mortgage platform and to staff training.

Users mapped out the existing method of processing mortgage applications utilising the “happy path of hand-offs” that helped focus attention on a few critical factors that could make all the difference in responding to customers in a timely manner.

The mortgage processing team was able to rapidly identify some key improvements prompted by the Open Orbit platform that would reduce rework and cycle times whilst eliminating non-value-adding work.

The platform helped avoid costly diversions into areas that would not have helped. For example, the business had a history of issues caused by complex and numerous templates used for generating customer communication. While this problem was genuine enough, in this instance it would not have helped with the immediate issue of inadequate processing capacity. Without this clarity, the team would have invested in solving for the complexity of templates, only to find that capacity was still inadequate.

The project team conducted workshops with subject matter experts from within the business. They framed the results on Open Orbit to create a succinct picture of what was going wrong, where, what could be done about it and how success would get measured.

Using Open Orbit simplified the communication and articulation of the problem and the solution to a diverse range of stakeholders. This was of immense benefit in ensuring that barriers to change were broken down, and the changes were well understood and accepted by the business.

The platform allowed the client to distill learnings from the project into standardised ways of re-use and sharing across teams. As staff use Open Orbit’s diagnostic features, they also automatically create reusable corporate memory of what works and why.

The campaign was successfully deployed to market – and the results exceeded expectation in large part due to the increased efficiency of back-office operations.